“An Invented People” (II)

Gingrich defended his statement on the Palestinians during Saturday’s debate. Paul made a fair point that his original statement wasn’t helpful and the U.S. shouldn’t be involved anyway, but neither Paul nor Romney directly contested the substance of what he said. Romney was so busy trying to demonstrate how obsequious he would be to Netanyahu that everything else faded into the background. He scored some points by painting Gingrich as a “bomb-thrower,” but otherwise Gingrich was able to bluff his way through the confrontation. I wouldn’t bother dwelling on this, but he managed to get away with insisting that his statement was accurate, and he repeatedly got away with the claim that he was just courageously telling the truth. He wasn’t telling the truth. He was peddling an ideological fantasy.

Gingrich originally said this:

Remember there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. And I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places.

The first half of this statement is really irrelevant to what Gingrich is claiming, and the fact that he doesn’t understand its irrelevance is another mark against him. During the Ottoman period, Syria and Lebanon weren’t states, either, and the inhabitants of these countries along with the Palestinians had local identities as well as a greater Syrian identity that they shared. These people had multiple overlapping identities, and one of these was a local national identity that was in the process of being formed. There was no recognized, independent Kurdish state in the Ottoman era, the Mandate period, or after WWII, but no one is so dense as to deny that the Kurds are a nation. The non-existence of a Palestinian state in the Ottoman period or later has no bearing on the existence of a Palestinian nation then or later. The nationhood of a people is not dependent on possession of their own state. The main things that are required in order to be a distinctive national group are a story of common origin and self-identification as a people. Obviously, the Palestinians have both, and they have had both for many decades.

The second part of Gingrich’s formulation doesn’t make much sense. Everyone acknowledges that Palestinians are Arabs, and their identity as Arabs is an important part of their Palestinian identity. What is Gingrich’s point? What he is trying to say is that Palestinians have no claim to the land of their ancestors because they are Arabs, and there are a lot of other Arab countries where they might go. In other words, the “chance” was an opportunity to abandon their own land to go become refugees in someone else’s country. This is a variant of what Huckabee was saying on this subject in the past when he was saying that there was no such thing as a Palestinian.

The idea that national identity is something that comes into existence at a particular moment in time is utterly foreign to people who say these things, and even if they acknowledged the existence of Palestinian nationhood they would still say that the recent construction of this identity renders it insignificant.

Gingrich’s remarks have nothing to do with telling the truth, and there’s certainly no courage required to make these statements. On the contrary, he is deliberately trying to deny an obvious reality to curry favor with hard-liners in his party. It’s a shame that the other candidates and the journalists at the debate allowed him to preserve the appearance of being someone interested in an accurate understanding of history.

P.S. Josh Marshall marvels that people are falling for Gingrich’s ridiculous claim about Palestinian not being a common term until after 1977. Weigel seems to think this remark was a “knowledge-bomb,” which only makes sense if the purpose of a “knowledge-bomb” is to destroy real knowledge.

Update: Matt Barganier has gathered several examples of much earlier uses of the word Palestinian to refer to Palestinian Arabs.

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17 Responses to “An Invented People” (II)

The main things that are required in order to be a distinctive national group are a story of common origin and self-identification as a people. Obviously, the Palestinians have both, and they have had both for many decades.

Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? What’s the evidence for this? (I’m not saying there isn’t any; I’d like to know the answer.) There’s serious scholarly debate as to when most European national identities crystallized; Eugen Weber painstakingly argues that it didn’t happen for the large majority of people in France until start of the 20th century. Has similar work been done for the Palestinians?

According to Walker Connor, a nation is the largest group that shares a myth of common descent. This would disqualify the Palestinians during the period you’re talking about and arguably even today.

These things can be actually calculated on Google’s “Ngram Viewer.” In fact, “Palestinian” was a more frequent term than “Israeli” in English publications until almost 1954, six years after the foundation of Israel. “Palestinian” stays flat until shortly after 1960, then takes off. “Israeli” peaked in 1985 and has been declining ever since; the trend lines suggest that “Palestinian” will be a more common term than “Israeli” sometime in the next few years.

Egypt Steve, that’s a little misleading since the pre-state Zionist settlers often used “Palestinian” to refer to their national project. See, for example, the Palestine Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair.

I agree with RRK here. I also think Walker Connor’s definition of nation is the best I’ve read. Given that definition, it’s very questionable whether the Palestinians are a nation. I’d argue that they’re not, although they may be by other definitions. A myth of common origin means just that. It doesn’t mean just a shared historical narrative or a self-conscious identification. Lots of non-national groups have those.

Again, all that would imply is that one particular argument for statehood, the argument from the supposed right to national self-determination, is invalid. But I haven’t even been hearing that argument much lately anyway. It sounds kind of 1970s. Statehood is argued for on other grounds nowadays.

Gingrich’s “1977” claim sounds kind of bizarre. (News flash, Gingrich says something bizarre!) Daniel Pipes cites again his (Pipes’) rather long article where he argues that Palestinian nationalism had a very clear and well-defined beginning: 1920, as an immediate reaction to both the San Remo Conference and the French conquest of Damascus in that year. It’s an interesting story, which is why I’m mentioning it, but I don’t think it’s relevant to Gingrich’s argument. The beginning of Palestinian nationalism doesn’t tell us much at all about the beginnings of the Palestinian nation, if such a thing exists at all.

A wonder that non or mixed semitic majority European Jews, intermarried at a rate of an naverage of several percentages a generation for millenia in Europe, have more claim to the land than pure Semites!

If the Cherokee Nation converts all those casino earnings into a serious military force, am I just another British North American who can return to the Mother Country anytime? Isn’t that the essence of the “they are just part of the Arab community” argument?

By restricting his definition of nation to “ethnic nation,” Connor pushes a whole lot of stuff into the category of “everything else.”

By Connor’s definition, America would probably not be a nation, and possibly has never been one. There are national and nationalist elements of course, like the Gettysburg Address, which he discusses. The Slavic nations, though, are certainly nations by this definition.

But Connor’s definition does seem relevant here. The Palestinians were not claiming to be what some people (Anthony Smith) call a “civic-territorial nation,” like America or France: obviously they don’t want to say that Jews in Hebron are part of their nation, as Jews in New York and Paris are part of the American and French “nations.” When Palestinians were claiming to be a nation at all, they were claiming to be an ethnic nation, so Connor’s definition is relevant at least on their own terms.

Also, what about nations that don’t share a myth of common descent, like, for example, the USA?

By Connor’s definition, America would probably not be a nation, and possibly has never been one.

People in the US describe themselves, almost universally, as “descendants of immigrants” or some variation thereof, with flourishes regarding oppression, opportunity, etc. What few people that can credibly claim First Nation lineage are a tiny minority. This qualifies as a “myth of common ancestry” not in the sense of literal genetics but as a description of where American ancestors were before America existed. A variation on this is the Nine Nations of North America, which posits that economic and historical factors have molded Americans into distinct and separate nations within the political entities of US/Canada/Mexico/Central America.

As for the Palestinians, I choose to take a practical approach. Arguing over the definition of “nation” doesn’t negate the fact that a one-state solution is manifestly impossible, and thus two well-defined territories need to exist, and by convention these two territories should enjoy the same legal statuses.

So Palestinians (and presumably Syrians, Egyptians, etc.) can’t be a nation because they are part of the larger, common-ancestry unit “Arabs,” while Russians and Poles, etc. are separate nations even though they are part of the larger, common-ancestry unit “Slavs”? I don’t see how this works.

By Connor’s definition, America would probably not be a nation, and possibly has never been one.

I’ve long held that the United States is not a nation (the Pledge of Allegiance notwithstanding — the vast majority of the residents of the United States do not understand the difference between a country and a nation).

The U.S. isn’t even a ‘melting pot’ as is often claimed. A better descriptor would be stew! Those who identify as ‘descendants of immigrants’ very often also identify as (fill-in-the-blank nation) plus hyphen plus American.

(But at what point does one eschew the ‘descendant of immigrants’ asks he who is of the 13th generation after immigration to what is now the United States?)

WB: Nations are subjective; they’re about nonrationally perceived ancestry. So, the Arabs are not a nation either. That idea’s been tried, didn’t work out too well. Ask Nasser. Neither are the Slavs, of course.

But who said the Egyptians aren’t a nation? They probably are, I don’t know.

If the Egyptians are a nation, despite not being the largest group that shares a myth of common descent (actually, that would be the human race), then why not the Palestinians? Unless you just want to say you’re not a nation unless you have a state.